All that glitters is gigabytes

Reviewed: The Great Gatsby.

When the Australian director Baz Luhrmann shot his first movie, Strictly Ballroom, there was a gulf between his budget (around $3m) and his ambition that had to be bridged by enthusiasm and sequins alone. This sort of gap can result in kitsch, and the film was certainly that, but it was also sincere; as an “ugly duckling” love story, it felt right that the movie itself was sprucing up its own raggedy feathers and exaggerating its bill.

Luhrmann left financial restraints behind long ago; if he can imagine it, he can get it made. As The Great Gatsby is also about a humble man muscling his way to a position where he need only conceive of, say, dancing girls turning cartwheels through cascades of champagne for it to become a reality, perhaps Luhrmann is the perfect candidate to make a razzle-dazzle film version. Admirers of F Scott Fitzgerald may feel differently.

Some have expressed scepticism about the contribution of the rapper Jay-Z to the movie’s soundtrack. In fact, the pulse of hiphop in The Great Gatsby, or a speakeasy scene featuring Amy Winehouse’s song “Back to Black”, is only following in the fine tradition of A Knight’s Tale, which used Queen’s “We Will Rock You” at a medieval jousting tournament.

One uncontroversial area of the film must be its cast. The performers are so shrill to begin with that there is a worry they have taken the acting style of Grease as their model. Half an hour in, everyone calms down. Tobey Maguire, with his gawping, froggy face, is an ideal Nick Carraway – the naif who arrives in 1920s New York and lives, literally and figuratively, in the shadow of the millionaire Jay Gatsby. Carey Mulligan is hauntingly good as Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby’s long-lost love, a light blancmange of a woman who turns out to have a centre you could break a tooth on. Leonardo DiCaprio captures the twitchy fragility beneath Gatsby’s manufactured swagger.

It’s certainly not DiCaprio’s fault that he makes a terrible entrance. Nick’s narration, which is gauche on the page but hyperbolic to the ear, sets up hoops, flaming hoops at that, for his co-stars to dive through. It hardly seems fair that the sight of Gatsby smiling after introducing himself has to compete not only with the background fanfare of fireworks and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, but with the sound of Nick’s description of that smile: “It seemed to understand and believe in you just as you wanted to be understood and believed in.” To which the only sane response can be: no, it doesn’t. It just looks like a faintly smug smile.

In a novel, we accept a voice that tells us what we are seeing. In a film, we have eyes to receive that information and actors to transmit it. The use of Nick’s voiceover is only the mildest of the intensifiers to which Luhrmann resorts – intensifiers that have the paradoxical effect of destabilising what we are watching, in the same way that it makes our confidence wobble when someone adds the word “honestly” to the end of the sentence “I love you” or “I’ll pay you back.” The most misbegotten of the intensifiers in The Great Gatsby is surely the use of 3D. It’s staggering to think that the film industry is selling imperfect technology that has yet to equal the sophistication of the View-Master device popular with children of the 1970s; for all the whooshing, computerised zooms, the predominant visual impression is that we are watching a staging of Fitzgerald’s novel in a Victorian toy theatre.

Audiences will be accustomed to Luhrmann’s “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach but it’s disconcerting that the “everything” in The Great Gatsby is comprised of pixels; all that glitters is gigabytes. The sets, including Gatsby’s Disneyland-meets-Sagrada Família home, were built by the brilliant designer Catherine Martin, although their splendour is often undermined by the optical fuzziness of computerised manipulation.

If the most recent Star Wars films taught us anything (apart from not to see any more Star Wars films) it is that actors inserted into locations where they have never actually stood will invariably look like cardboard standees. There should be an artificiality to the opulence on display but it probably shouldn’t feel as though Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s mansion is nestling in the grounds of Teletubbyland.

None of this would matter if Luhrmann were making a point about profligacy, but his film is too dependent for its energy on Gatsby’s ostentatious parties to achieve any satirical strikes. This is a clear case of a film’s subtext (money can’t buy you everything) being undermined by the message of its own style (yes it can). What makes The Great Gatsbya failure is Luhrmann’s fear of the delicate moment, the ungilded lily. His camera whizzes across Manhattan, hurtling down the sides of skyscrapers, until overkill seeps into every quiet corner. The bespectacled eyes of Dr T J Eckleburg survey New York from his billboard, but any sense of omniscient morality present in the book is absent. I just kept thinking: “Why isn’t he wearing 3D glasses?”

Ryan Gilbey is the New Statesman's film critic. He is also the author of It Don't Worry Me (Faber), about 1970s US cinema, and a study of Groundhog Day in the "Modern Classics" series (BFI Publishing). He was named reviewer of the year in the 2007 Press Gazette awards.